


Stories about Clint Barton

by altheterrible



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Self-Harm, Suicide, Suicide Attempt, Whump
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-22
Updated: 2015-05-22
Packaged: 2018-03-31 15:49:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 12,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3983851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/altheterrible/pseuds/altheterrible
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One-shots centering around Clint Barton. Please heed the warnings in the summaries of each individual story, as these run the range from relatively fluffy ("You Owe Me", "Assassins & Tiaras") to very dark ("Shackled," "Life"). </p>
<p>All of these occur pre-Age of Ultron, so Clint's family isn't a thing.</p>
<p>Also these are all reposts as this is a new account.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Assassins & Tiaras

**Author's Note:**

> A collection of one-shots. These were originally betaed by AO3 user bequirk, who has since deleted her account.
> 
> Many of these are some of my earliest writing and are correspondingly rough.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint finds a way to deal with his feelings after Manhattan. It's not conventional, but it works for him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No major triggers in this story, but as always, proceed with caution.

"Look," Clint said irritably in response to the chorus of rolling eyes, "I know it's fucking stupid. I know that. But fucking stupid helps me stop  _thinking_ , and if I can stop thinking for five goddamn seconds..."

He trailed off, well aware that he'd said too much, had let too much slip. He wasn't supposed to talk about it. He was  _supposed_ to pretend like everything was fine and dandy, as if, in the days since Loki, his own thoughts  _hadn't_  devolved into an endless shrieking cacophony of incoherence that he had the privilege of being tuned into 24/7.

Mostly, he was successful at it. Mostly, he didn't let it show, didn't let them know.

There were cracks in his facade, sure. But they were small enough that anyone with even a mild desire to avoid an awkward feelings-fest could ignore them without compunction.

The Avengers were good people. Really. But no one could blame them for wanting to avoid an awkward feelings-fest, Clint thought.

Though it also occurred to him that maybe, just maybe, they were pretending not to notice the cracks to save Clint the embarrassment of their pity.

As long as they ignored the cracks, Clint didn’t care about the why, not really. And ignore the cracks they did.

And while they did that, Clint found ways to fix the cracks, or, at least, to hide them.

He tried drinking, first, because that was obvious and easy. And Stark had a seriously immense stash of liquor; he wouldn't be able to drink all of that in a lifetime. But then a sparring match with Natasha went badly awry due to a hangover and, well, Clint’s ego needed him to shape the fuck up.

He didn't mind losing to her. That happened about two-thirds of the time. Just losing  _that badly_ sucked _._

So Clint tried different avenues. Meditation with Bruce, for one. And that went okay, but after a couple of sessions, Clint had to acknowledge that it just wasn't going to work. Meditation left him empty, yeah, but he didn't  _need_  emptiness. It was way, way too easy to let that emptiness fill with memories of a harsh blue light, to fill with a cold voice, always repeating, 'You have heart.'

That wasn't okay.

The solution was something that Clint only stumbled upon by accident. Alone in his shiny new apartment in Stark Tower one day, contemplating the bottle of Jack Daniel's on the table next to him, he was flipping through the 900 channels he now had access to.

And he somehow ended up watching a show called "Toddlers & Tiaras."

Within half an hour, he'd been hooked.

Not because he gave a shit about children's beauty pageants, or children in general, or really any aspect of the show.

He was hooked because it was fucking stupid.

And that was its main attraction. Its only attraction, actually. It was fucking stupid. It required no real thought or effort to watch. There wasn't really much there to process.

When Phil had been alive (and that was a landmine Clint wasn't going to go  _anywhere_  near, thank you very much) he'd talked about this benefit several times. Clint had made fun of him for it, for the stodgy agent's love of...Supernanny.

But since he wasn't thinking about Phil, didn't want to think at all, really, Clint just avoided any of the shows his former handler had preferred and went along his merry, vapid, shallow way.

Because he was nowhere near ready to rip that bandaid off yet.

When the show was over, Clint was no longer plagued by his own thoughts, wasn't being dragged under by guilt and despair. And he wasn't empty, either. He was disgusted. And annoyed. And actually, kind of angry.

It gave him something to hate that wasn't himself, and well, what more could he ask for?

He delved into reality television with gusto.

That wasn't enough, though, and soon he saw he was going to have to take it further.

After reality television, then, came pop music. He found himself tuning his radio to the most obnoxious, poppy stations he could find. Listening to that kind of crap was annoying enough that, even during long drives in the car, he couldn't stop thinking about how much he wished he was listening to  _anything else_.

It didn't leave him any time to feel guilty at all, no time to dwell on the past, no time to hate himself, or plot revenge, or wallow.

And maybe,  _maybe_  it could be viewed as some kind of masochistic atonement thing. But given what he  _thought_ he deserved, the steady diet of reality TV and pop music he was feeding himself wasn't punishment. Not really.

It really was just a distraction. A really fucking annoying distraction.

For weeks, he filled his free time with the pursuit of irritation. He gritted his teeth through hours of the top 40. He rolled his eyes through Toddlers & Tiaras, Jersey Shore, and Teen Mom, raging internally at the morons who wound up on those shows. It drove him absolutely fucking nuts.

So much so that he couldn't focus on the fact that he  _was_  absolutely fucking nuts. Thoughts of Loki, of what he'd done under Loki's control, were, for the most part, banished from his mind. And maybe it wasn't normal to be so annoyed all the time, but given his alternatives? He'd take it. It was a solution. It worked.

Except for days like today.

Today had been Clint's first mandated appointment with SHIELD’s Psych Services. It had taken SHIELD almost two months to get their shit in order, but they finally had, and now Clint had to show up at Dr. Fuckface's office twice a week for what seemed like the rest of eternity.

Starting today. And  _all_  they'd talked about, for the whole hour, was Loki. No matter how hard Clint tried to change the topic, to cover _anything else_ , they always came back to the demigod who Clint had nicknamed “That Asshole.”

Now, after that miserable endeavor, Clint was ready to not think. Except it was Thursday. Which meant it was movie night. And it was absolutely, 100% forbidden for any Avenger to ever miss movie night. This was actually something Stark had gotten into contracts, somehow, that he'd then managed to get everyone to sign—no doubt as part of his ongoing effort to be as annoying as humanly possible.

There  _was_  a clause outlining exceptions applicable in the case of emergency or injury, but Clint didn't really think his situation counted. Especially since movie night was supposedly going to  _help_  with the team's collective 'issues.' Bonding and shit.

He couldn't use his 'issues' to escape.

So he did the next best thing, and suggested a movie that he knew would allow him to stop thinking altogether.

And looking around at the rest of the team, he knew he was going to get his way. They all looked a little bit uneasy, not quite sure how to proceed. It was the first time Clint had been so open with them, and no one wanted to ruin the moment.

Clint watched it dawn on all of them:

They were just going to have to do what Clint wanted.

Tony, though, couldn't help but protest. "Barton. You can't be serious. Twilight is..." he shrugged helplessly, like he couldn't decide what insult, of all his possible options, he wanted to hurl at the movie.

Natasha looked equally disgusted with Clint's choice, but she put a brave face on and said, "No, I think Clint's right. It'll be good for us to, um. Relax. Besides, last week Banner made us watch The Fountain and I thought that was a little...heavy. Something lighter will be...nice." She grimaced before offering Clint a half-smile.

Well, he could always count on Nat to have his back, even when she clearly wasn't happy about it.

After a moment, Bruce nodded his slow agreement. Steve and Thor seemed indifferent, their pop culture knowledge insufficient to warn them of what horror was ahead of them. Tony heaved a sigh and agreed, "Fine. Whatever. But I reserve the right to mock both you and the movie endlessly, Legolas."

Clint shrugged. "Whatever." It was two hours that he wasn't going to have to think during, and hopefully the movie would be annoying enough to keep him distracted for even longer. It seemed like a pretty good deal to him. "Get the popcorn."

Tony scoffed. "Yeah, no. I'm watching this teenage drama bullshit, you can get your own damn popcorn."

So Clint did. He even made enough for everyone else.

Even Tony.

And that's how the Avengers ended up watching Twilight.

(Don't tell anyone, but they liked it enough to watch the rest of the series, too.)


	2. Bad Habit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint has a bad habit, but it's not a big deal.
> 
> Until...it is.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note that this story contains graphic descriptions of self-injury.

It's just a bad habit, that's all. And everybody has one.

That's what he'd told Nat when she'd found him the first time, standing alone in the darkened locker room at SHIELD, blood streaming thick and viscous from the fresh gashes in his thighs.

There wasn't really any point in trying to deny it, or lying about what he'd been doing. The box cutter he'd had clasped loosely in one hand kind of made that futile. And if that hadn't, the deer-in-the-headlights expression on his face probably did.

She'd surprised him, which was impressive. Not for her, not really. Nat was good. But Clint liked to think he was hard to sneak up on. Not many people could do it.

Granted, he'd been distracted, so he tried not to hold his lapse in vigilance against himself.

He could forgive himself that.

Their helicopter had landed back at SHIELD after midnight, and Clint had headed straight for the showers. The water had washed away the grime from the mission, the smoke residue, the blood that was not his. It washed away all the evidence of everything that had gone wrong, of all the mistakes he'd made. It got rid of the evidence, but it couldn't actually  _change_ what had happened. That was permanent, final, inescapable, imprinted firmly into his brain.

 

And it wasn't fair, not really. That he could just waltz into these people's lives, firing arrows and bullets, an agent of chaos and destruction. He could just come in and take  _everything_ from them and leave, like he'd never been there at all. He'd go home afterwards, maybe watch television, have dinner, maybe call it an early night, whatever. But the people who'd died because he'd missed his shot by two inches? They were done. Over and ended, while he watched bad reality TV.

It ate at him.

He couldn't change what had happened, though. But he didn't have to. He just had to find a way to make it  _feel_  better, as pathetic as that was. To get the weight off his chest so he could breathe again. It felt like he was cheating, and he hated himself because he was so weak that he  _needed_ to cheat, but that didn't stop him. He needed the release, to forget just for a little while.

Above all else, Clint was a ruthless pragmatist, and if it worked, well, that was good enough. He had a job to do, couldn't let something as asinine as his overactive conscience get in the way of that. If he could quiet its inanity even for a few minutes, he would.

He explained all of this to Nat. "This isn't the first time," he'd told her, and that was true. Christ, it had been  _years_  at that point, at least fifteen years since the first time. Fifteen years, and it still  _worked_ , still kept him on his feet, so " _No_ , this is  _not_ a 'problem.'"

And she'd dropped it.

Not forever, though. The next time a mission had gone south, she had followed him closely for hours, making small talk, making him buy her dinner, sticking around for a movie, just generally acting entirely unlike Natasha. It had taken him the better part of the night to figure out what she was doing and why. When he had, he hadn't been angry. He'd actually been amused.

"Nat, stop."

"Stop what?"

She did the I-don't-know-what-you're-talking-about thing really well, he'd give her that. But he was more perceptive than that, Christ, give him some damn credit. "You can go. I'm fine."

Natasha shrugged, dropping the act. "Yeah, for now. Gonna still be fine later?"

"Sure."

It was the truth, too. He didn't  _always_  need to fall back on vices to get him through rough spots. Fuck, he hardly  _ever_ did it, maybe once or twice a year at the most. Still, Natasha leaned in close and scrutinized him before decided that, yes, he was being honest and not trying to ditch her so he could get down to business. Satisfied with what she saw, she'd departed for the night.

Eight months later, a mission had gone badly and Nat hadn't been able to stick close afterwards. She'd been stuck in medical, getting stitched back together after a knife fight with an Albanian. A knife fight that shouldn't have happened, except Clint hadn't been watching her position as closely as he should have and she'd been ambushed. Surprised.

That was unacceptable, and, well, vices  _do_ have their place. Their uses.

 

When she saw that bandage on the back of his hand a day later, she'd sighed and closed her eyes before asking, "So, when  _was_ the first time?"

 

Fifteen years. Back when he was just a kid, bumming around with the circus. And honestly? He didn't remember  _why_ he had done it, had decided to take a blade to his skin, to scar his own body. It seemed kind of strange, now that he was thinking about it, but he hadn't really marked the occasion as something huge and important in his mind. With a decade and half of time, it had faded with little to no objection from him.

Natasha hadn't seemed satisfied with his answer, but it was all he could give her, and when it became clear that he wasn't being reticent, just forgetful, she let it go.

After that, she never brought it up again. Explicitly, anyway. She just watched him. And time passed, and she watched, and they had an exceptionally long streak of good luck, and so he stopped doing it, and she stopped watching, and he'd actually thought that he was, well, 'better.'

For five years, he'd been fine. Five. Years.

But then...all of  _this_ had happened and now 'fine' was not a word he would be applying to himself anytime soon.

The official report, which had taken three weeks to come out, had said "fifteen." That is, fifteen people that he'd killed working for Loki. Of course, Clint personally liked to add in all the people who'd died in Manhattan as well, since Loki never would have made it that far in his plans without Clint's help. Plus there were the people who'd been killed on the Helicarrier. So the 'actual' count was more like...four hundred and twenty one.

That was a lot of people.

And consequently, it seemed natural, what he was doing now. It just needed to be done, it was the solution to the problem, and if he'd caused the problem he could damn well fix it himself.

Dodging Nat had been the hard part, of course, because he suspected that she suspected, of course she  _would_. She was a hard one to lie to, and she was next to impossible to avoid, but through some combination of luck and skill, Clint had managed to make his way home unaccompanied.

He locked the door behind him. And then the bathroom door, too, just to be safe. He stripped down to his boxers and took a few deep breaths.

Four hundred and twenty one was a lot of people, but it wasn't insurmountable.

He started low on his left arm, on the ventral side near the thumb joint. The knife was the one he'd had in his boot when he'd attacked the Helicarrier. It was a personal favorite, actually, well balanced and so sharp that the blade practically faded into nothing at the edge. The grip was comfortable in his hand, familiar, and he pressed the blade down into his skin before pulling back quickly.

It stung. Burned, actually, but he ignored it, ignored the blood that bubbled to the surface and streamed down his hand and dripped onto the floor. He repositioned the blade, a quarter of an inch further up his arm and, gritting his teeth, repeated the action.

He managed to get to twenty before he ran out of room. He rotated his arm and started at the wrist again, this time moving up the dorsal side. He was methodical, each cut even in depth and length, and he worked his way up to his shoulder.

At sixty, Clint switched to his other arm, briefly noting how hard it was to hold the knife steady.

At eighty, he began to feel dizzy. Surveying his surroundings explained why.

There was a lot of blood. More than he'd expected. Drips and drops dotted the floor, the countertops, some had splashed into the tub. It was on the walls, somehow, painting red streaks on the white tile. There were tacky handprints on the towels, the shower curtain...his face. The rug was soaked, and bloody footprints tracked across the room, back and forth, evidence of the frenetic pacing he hadn't been able to stop once he'd started.

And the  _smell_ , oh God, how hadn't he noticed it before? The thick, coppery tang was so heavy he could practically  _taste_ it.

His stomach turned.

But he forced the nausea down, willing himself to continue. He was only at eighty, not even a quarter of the way done. He had to get through over three hundred more, so he couldn't get sidetracked. Not now.

At one hundred and ten, he began to think that he should have started at his ankles. Bending over to reach them now was making his head spin so badly that he could hardly keep count.

Somewhere around one hundred and twenty five ( _one twenty six? seven?_ ), the pounding at the door started.

A few moments later came the yelling.

"Barton, open the damn door. I've been calling you for forty-five minutes! I know you're in there, I can hear your phone ringing!"

Hmm. So it was. But he'd left it on his bed, and he wasn't about to stop now to check his voicemail.

When Clint got to what he had decided he was going to call one hundred and thirty, he heard the distinct sound of his front door being kicked in, followed by Natasha's muffled cursing from his bedroom. "Shit, what is he  _doing_?"

 

Then the pounding started on the  _bathroom_ door and Clint lost count entirely. The knife slipped in his grip and dug deep into his right calf, just below the knee. For a moment, he stared at the wound, three inches long and half an inch deep, pouring blood down his leg, and wondered idly if maybe he could count that as more than one.

Or, maybe he shouldn't count it at all, since he hadn't been trying...

He straightened, vaguely aware that the pounding on the door was increasing dramatically in volume, as was Natasha's yelling. But moving so quickly had made the whole world cant to the right and so instead of moving to open the door and see what she wanted (like he'd intended) he actually just toppled over. He caught himself on the wall briefly, the friction between his skin and the tiles holding him up, but his balance was too fucked to stay that way and so he slid to the ground, leaving a wide swath of red on the wall behind him.

Natasha didn't really need him to open the door for her anyway, since she broke it down a moment later.

"Could've picked the lock, Nat," Clint tried to say, but all that came out was something consisting entirely of  _m_  and  _n_ sounds. That was fine, as it turned out, because she wasn't listening anyway.

"Fuck, Clint," she breathed, standing framed in the doorway. "God, I should've known you were going to..."

Natasha trailed off, opting instead to cross into the bathroom. She tried to avoid the blood, but at this point, it was futile. She realized that fairly quickly and abandoned her effort, barreling in instead, grabbing the towel from the hook on the back of the door and approaching Clint cautiously. She knelt down next to him and used the towel to wipe away some of the blood and sweat so she could see the damage.

A cursory look (combined with the huge amount of blood surrounding them) told her all she needed to know, so she took out her cell phone.

Clint, who had been lying there passively and letting her examine him, rallied and became more animated. "No," he mumbled, fingers fumbling across the floor towards where he'd dropped the knife. "I'm only at a hundred and thirty, Nat, I'm not even halfway done..."

But she reached across him and picked the knife up, tossing it into the sink. "No, Clint. You're done. Trust me, you're done."

Clint wanted to argue, wanted to more than anything. Because leaving this undone, incomplete, left the weight on his chest, and he couldn't fucking  _breathe_. But he was too tired to argue, too close to unconsciousness, and as he heard her make the call for an ambulance, all he could do was close his eyes and wait.

He woke up in the hospital, in restraints, wrapped in bandages, sore and aching.

Natasha was sitting next to his bed, watching him wake. When she was sure he was coherent, she said, "You almost died. Was that the point?"

His throat was dry, but he managed to rasp out, "No. Don't be stupid, Nat, this is just—"

She cut him off, gesturing at him, at the restraints, the bandages. "Don't even go there. This is more than a  _bad habit_ , Clint."

His only response was a non-committal, "Maybe."


	3. Life

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When they told Clint that Natasha was dead, he of course didn't believe them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for major character death.

When they told Clint that Natasha was dead, he of course didn't believe them.

After all, Phil had been dead. Stark had been dead. Hell, Thor had been dead. The whole being dead thing apparently wasn't a terminal condition, because all of them were fine now. Sure, Phil had a terrifying scar that took up half his chest, and Stark came home from Afghanistan and became a superhero, and Thor had lost his brother, but really? They were fine.

And Clint knew that Natasha would never let Stark beat her at anything—including staying alive—so he  _knew_ that she wasn't dead. Or, if she was, she wasn't going to stay that way. No one else did.

When they brought him to see her body, he didn't believe them then, either.

Rogers had looked the same way, once. Cold to the touch. Pale. Still. And now he was running a team of goddamn superheroes, like that was normal. He'd come back from death. He was fine.

Natasha would be fine, too.

Gunshot wound to the head notwithstanding.

Banner, after all, had survived a gunshot wound to the head. Natasha wouldn't let one injury beat her; she never had before.

When they eulogized her, though, Clint began to have doubts. He listened to the people who spoke at her funeral—Fury, Phil, Rogers—in a daze. When it was his turn to say a few words, to address the congregation, he found he couldn't say anything. Instead, he stood at the pulpit near the casket, itchy in his dress shirt and tie, in utter silence. He didn't want to play anymore, didn't want to keep this farce up. Hadn't they all taken this far enough? Wasn't it time to stop the charade? To let Natasha come laughing around the corner and mock him for even thinking for one second that they might be right?

Clint decided he wasn't going to go along with it anymore. He wasn't going to keep pretending that his best friend was gone forever. That the most important person in his life had just vanished. That one of the pillars of his whole existence had shattered.

So he stalked out of the chapel and into the cold November air, whipping his phone out of his pocket as he walked.

He dialed the familiar number, leaning against the brick wall of the church, trying to stay out of the misting rain.

The phone rang and rang in his ear, but Natasha didn't answer. He just got her voicemail, the same message it had been since she'd gotten a phone. "This is Romanoff. Leave a message."

Clint did. "Nat. Jesus Christ. What the hell? Nat, they're saying you're  _dead_ , they're saying they're going to put you in the fucking  _ground_ , Nat, but they  _can't_. You're not dead. You can't be dead. Stark's not dead. Phil's not. Rogers isn't. Fuck, Nat." He took a deep, gasping breath. "Nat, I swear to God. You promised. You said it was going to be you and me. Together. That's what we  _agreed_ on, so if you fucking  _left me_ here, I—"

A hand landed on his shoulder. Startled, Clint turned to face whoever had decided to interrupt him.

It was Phil. Gently, he pried the phone out of Clint's hand and ended the phone call, making eye contact. "Barton. Clint. She's...Natasha is  _dead_ , Clint."

Clint flinched back. "No."

"Yes," Phil insisted, voice firm. "She is. I'm sorry, but she  _is_. Her last mission went south, Barton. Her cover got blown. It was bad luck, and it shouldn't have happened—"

No. Clint wasn't going to listen to this bullshit. "Fuck that." Really? Bad luck? Natasha was better than bad luck. Natasha looked bad luck in the eyes and laughed in its face. "Fuck that, and fuck you." He whirled around, briefly observing the growing crowd of people just outside the church doors. Damn it, he was making a scene. He needed to calm down; he wasn't the guy who drew attention to himself like this. Clint took a deep breath, ignoring how it caught in his throat.

Phil grabbed Clint by the shoulder, leading him away from the onlookers, towards his car. Softly, he repeated, "Clint. I'm sorry. She's dead."

"Stop saying that!" Clint snarled, ripping his arm out of Phil's grip. "Why won't you stop saying that?"

"Because it's true," Phil answered evenly, stepping up to the passenger's side door and opening it. "Get in."

Clint ignored him. "No. It's not true," Clint denied. He pointed back towards the crowd, where Stark was pushing his way towards the front. "That asshole is alive. You're alive. Rogers is alive. Fuck, Banner shot himself in the  _head_ and he's alive. So why should Nat be dead? She's not any different than they are!"

Phil sighed. "Clint...that's just life."

That was the worst fucking thing Clint had ever heard in his life, and he'd heard some doozies. "Yeah. Right." He looked up, meeting Phil's eyes. "Phil, she promised. She said she was going to be careful. Damn it, we agreed! We were going to die together, covering each others' backs! That was the goddamn  _plan_ , Phil! She wouldn't just break a promise like that!" He needed to make Phil understand, needed to make him stop saying that shit. This joke had gone on long enough.

But Phil just shook his head. "No, Barton, she wouldn't have. But she didn't get to make that choice. Someone else made it for her. And now she's gone."

Slowly, slowly, the absolute certainty Clint had felt began to crack. Phil wouldn't lie to him. Fury, yeah. Hill, probably. But Phil? Clint knew he could trust him. Phil had been there and had Clint's back since his first days at SHIELD, when he'd just been a scared shitless, punk-ass kid. And Phil was saying Nat was dead. That she was gone. That she had broken her promise because someone else had taken the choice from her.

That  _was_ the only way Nat would break a promise, if someone else interfered.

Suddenly, Clint's knees buckled. He caught himself on the open door of Phil's car, and then Phil was guiding him inside the vehicle. "Easy, Barton. Easy."

When all of Clint's body parts were in the car, Phil shut the door and went over to the driver's side. He got in and put the key in the ignition before turning to Clint. "Are you okay?"

Clint wasn't. It felt suddenly as if someone had placed a massive lead weight on his chest, like he couldn't draw more than shallow breaths. He shook his head quickly once, but that was a mistake. Nausea rushed through him, and he threw the car door open again, managing to get most of his puke outside of the vehicle.

Then he shut the door and leaned back against the seat, swallowing hard against his rebelling stomach.

Natasha was...dead. Phil said so. Phil said so, and so it was true, and that meant that she was gone. She wasn't coming back. Phil had come back. So had Stark. Rogers. Thor.  _Everyone_ came back, but Natasha wasn't going to.

She'd broken her promise, had gotten herself killed, and she  _wasn't coming back_.

He was alone.

Clint tried to take a deep breath, to quell his rising nausea, but his breath turned into a sob halfway through and so he aborted that mission, thinking maybe he could just never breathe again.

That would be all right.

He rocked back against the seat before leaning forward, head between his knees, cramped in the small space of the passenger's seat.

"Breathe, Clint," Phil prompted on his left. "Just breathe."

Clint shook his head, stubborn, trying to ignore the burning in his lungs and the tears that had appeared unbidden, running down his face. But soon, his lungs won out against his self-control and he took a huge, gasping breath.

And then he was talking. "It's not fair! Phil, she promised, and it's not fair, and why isn't she coming back? Why doesn't she get a second chance? Huh? Why not her?"

Phil shrugged helplessly, then offered softly, "Natasha had her second chance, Clint. She's had a third and fourth and fifth chance. She was bound to run out of luck sometime, that's the job."

"The job is bullshit," Clint ground out, jaw clenched. But he knew Phil was right. Both of them were just humans, and they'd both escaped death more than their fair share of times. Sooner or later, well. You could only outrun death for so long.

He leaned his head against the cold glass of the window, trying to calm his breathing. Still, every breath hitched in his chest. Part of him hated breaking down like this, but this was  _Phil_ , and he'd seen Clint at his worst. Had handled him after fubar missions and through all kinds of other shit. So maybe he could just let go and stop trying to keep an iron grip on himself.

His shoulders began to shake.

Phil reached out a hand and rested it briefly on Clint's back before starting the car. "Yeah. It is bullshit, Clint." He turned the heat on to the warmest setting, then looked back at his passenger. "Do you...do you want to go to the burial? Or should I bring you home?"

Clint sniffled, ashamed of the sound. "I..." Part of him felt like he should go to the cemetery, to see the interment. Pay his last respects to Natasha now. But he didn't know if he could take it. Or if he wanted everyone to see him like this. No. He didn't want that. Didn't want them witness his grief. It felt private, like something that he should hold close to his heart. Like he'd held his friendship with Natasha. "You can drop me off at my place."

Phil shook his head. "I'm not leaving you alone right now. You just lost your best friend."

"She's been dead for days, Phil," Clint pointed out, voice hollow.

"Not to you," Phil answered simply, pulling out of the parking lot and heading towards Clint's apartment.

* * *

 

Clint went to Natasha's grave for the first time four weeks after she was buried.

He went alone.

And he talked to her, crouching on his haunches next to her headstone.

"You know, I didn't believe them. Fury. Hill. They said you'd died, and I thought they were lying to me." He paused. "Why would I have believed them? Would you? I mean, they lie about everything." He chuckled. "Anyway, I figured they were hiding you in a secret medical bay or something, like they did with Coulson. Even after I saw your body, I thought you were going to come back. Everyone comes back, you know? I guess...I guess we've kind of come to expect that."

He stopped, swallowing the lump in his throat, then resumed, "I still don't think it's fair. But Phil tells me 'that's life,' and I guess I know that. I always have. Just...I thought things would be different. We were  _superheroes_ , Nat. We're supposed to get a happy ending. You'd probably laugh and tell me I've been watching too many movies, if you were here and heard me saying that. But I just...hoped. I guess."

Crying outright, now, the December wind chapping his cheeks, Clint went on, "We all miss you at the Tower. Stark's still an asshole, and Rogers misses sparring with someone who can actually match him, and Banner says you were teaching him Russian but never got much further than the alphabet. That's too bad. I know you're a good teacher." He smiled briefly. "You're the only reason I passed my Russian language tests at SHIELD. But you knew that."

He stopped, doing a quick scan of the area around him. He was still entirely alone, so he kept going. "I was angry at first. That you'd broken your promise. But I guess it wasn't your fault. It's not like you chose to let some asshole shoot you in the head. I know that's not something you would have wanted. And it's not fair that it happened. That's life, though. Or so Phil says."

"I miss you, too. Obviously. Like I even need to say it."

He stood in silence for a few moments, listening to the wind rustling through the trees. A few cars went by on the nearby street, and snow began to fall in large, wet flakes.

Clint brushed the snow out of his hair. "What happened was bullshit. It's bullshit that you're gone and I'm still here, stuck dealing with Stark's idiocy and Roger's ridiculous training schedule and SHIELD trying to get me to train rookies. It's bullshit, and I'm pissed off about it. But I'm not pissed off at you."

He paused, before concluding, "I'm pissed off, but I think I'm going to be okay. I think. So don't go feeling sorry for me in the afterlife. And don't worry about me." He grinned ruefully, "Your luck ran out, Nat, that's all. Mine can't be that far behind. But that's life, right?"

With that, he roughly wiped his eyes and turned and walked back towards his car, parked outside the cemetery gates.

Yeah, this was life.

And life was bullshit.


	4. One Year

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint's life for the year following Loki's attack on Manhattan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for attempted suicide.

For the first 5 days, he does not get out of bed, except to take care of those bodily functions that he cannot stop through willpower alone. He lies immobile, frozen, unable to sleep but unwilling to move, too afraid to face a world that sees him as a murderer.

On day 6, Natasha comes and literally drags him from his stupor. She watches him shower, and dress, and brings him to SHIELD for his disciplinary hearing.

There, to Fury and the other higher-ups, Clint argues in what he feels is a passionate, convincing manner for his own immediate dismissal from the agency, to be followed by his arrest and imprisonment.

By the end, he is begging them.

Fury shakes his head 'no,' and that's that. They do not fire him, do not arrest him, do not lock him up and throw away the key.

They do send him to see a shrink.

During breakfast on the 10th day, Clint muses aloud to the general population of the kitchen that he thought he might have preferred that Loki had just killed him, but he thought he understood why Loki had done things this way, instead. Living with the guilt is worse, and Loki is a cruel bastard who'd want to draw his suffering out as long as possible.

Absorbed in his own thoughts, he misses the concerned looks that circulate through the room.

Day 14 dawns bright and cheerful, and Clint emerges from his bedroom with a too-wide smile and tells everyone that he is taking a vacation. Twelve hours later, he cuts his wrists with his pocketknife and nearly bleeds to death in the underground parking garage, lying in the backseat of one of Tony's sports cars.

JARVIS informs the others, thereby saving his life; Tony does not once complain about the blood on his upholstery.

Clint spends days 15 through 75 in the hospital. When he emerges on the morning of day 76, the scars on his arms are fading and, while he is not entirely sure that he wants to live, he has at least been convinced that he does not want to die.

His welcome-home party is a subdued affair, but there's cake, and he makes a joke about being allowed to eat with real silverware. The resultant laughter is strained, but by the end of the night, everyone's treating him like he's almost normal.

He's reinstated at SHIELD on day 97 after three more weeks of 'recovery' that mostly consisted of agitated pacing, sleepless nights, and too much whiskey, interspersed with five two-hour therapy sessions a week.

His first major mission begins on day 108. It lasts through day 118, and he and Natasha return to Stark Tower on day 119 bruised and battered, but ultimately successful.

Or not. Clint locks himself in his room through day 121. Tony presses Natasha for information, but she just shrugs with infuriating calmness and says, "Why don't you ask him?"

She doesn't seem worried, but Tony's too damn curious for his own good, and he's never been one to turn down a challenge. He has JARVIS monitor Barton, and waits until the archer emerges from his room at 3:32 AM on day 122.

Tony accosts him in the kitchen. "Morning, Barton. How's it going?"

Clint had been digging through the fridge, but he slowly pivots and straightens. "Nothing."

Tony decides to let the fact that his answer made absolutely no sense slide. "You've been in your room for two days."

"Yeah."

"Why?"

"I needed to think."

"About what?"

Silently and empty-handed, Clint turns and heads back towards his room. Tony follows him, thought Clint ignores his new shadow. But not entirely, because before he shuts the door behind him, he says, "Do you know how hard it is, to choose to kill someone, after you've done it without thinking?"

"...No, Barton, I don't."

"I know." And then he shuts the door.

They make it until day 243 without a major incident. Sure, Clint is still drinking too much, and sometimes locks himself in his room for days at a time, but that's the new 'normal' and everyone seems to be adjusting to it fairly well.

It's Bruce who notices something's wrong.

"I don't think Barton's sleeping," he says to the others over a late breakfast. Clint and Natasha are absent, having left for work at 7:30.

"Huh," Tony muses. "Why do you say that?"

Bruce shrugs. "He looks like hell. More than usual. I found him dozing in the kitchen yesterday afternoon, and that's just weird. He doesn't nap, and he really doesn't nap there."

Steve nods in agreement. "Same thing happened with me a few days ago. Except it was in the gym."

Thor, who has relocated to Earth for an extended visit with his hot astrophysicist girlfriend, adds, "He truly does not seem well."

Tony agrees, and makes a note to look into it. In the end, though, he doesn't have to. When he's watching the news later, he sees a story break that explains everything.

He calls Fury immediately. "Did you know this was going to happen?"

"Yeah, Stark, I did. And before you ask, so did Barton. It's not gonna be a problem."

Tony begs to differ, and he thinks the dark circles under Barton's eyes would beg to differ as well. "You don't think this is a problem? His face is plastered all over the fucking news. They're calling him a murderer, Nick. How did this even get out?"

But Tony already knows that. There's always someone willing to go to the media, for the right price. And it's a pretty juicy story, that SHIELD never punished a man who was known to have killed several people in the days leading up to the events in Manhattan the previous May. Hell, there was video footage of him at work, and yet he'd walked free.

Well, 'free.' Tony didn't think the public would understand exactly how 'un-free' Barton really was. Or they wouldn't care. They just wanted the story, the sensationalism, the furor.

Fury reassures him that they've got the situation under control. "This story is going nowhere, Stark. We've got it handled."

Tony knows the director is completely full of shit the next time he sees Barton, which isn't until day 245.

"Christ, what happened to you?"

Because Clint has a black eye and a split lip, and a nasty cut near his eyebrow that is still slowly leaking a tacky stream of blood down his face. He's also limping badly, his gait slow and uneven.

"Oh. Nothing. Just ran into...something."

As it turned out, the 'something' was a group of new SHIELD recruits. It was their first day of training, and to prove their loyalty to their country and their physical acumen to each other, they'd ganged up on Clint (the 'traitor') and beaten the hell out of him. Tony was horrified to discover that at least four veteran SHIELD agents had stood by and allowed the attack to take place, jeering.

"But couldn't you have taken them, Barton?" Tony asks, incredulous. "They were rookies."

Clint at least has the decency to look chagrined when he answers, "Well, probably. Didn't seem worth it, though. They just had to get it out of their systems. Everything should be fine, now."

Tony somehow refrains from punching Clint in his stupid, already-bruised, masochistic face and instead personally drives him to the hospital, even sitting with him while the doctors patch him up. Clint finds this oddly touching.

He is laid up in the Tower with a broken ankle until day 305.

When he returns to SHIELD on day 306, it is to discover that the group of recruits and the four agents who had just stood by and watched his assault have been fired and banned from the premises, and are in fact facing criminal charges. And, well, Clint finds that oddly touching, too.

The Avengers decide to celebrate his return to full health (and employment), and there's cake again, and this time everyone treats him like he's completely normal.

On day 315, he wakes up and realizes that, for the first time in almost a year, he feels completely normal.

Day 336 dawns bright and cheerful, and Clint emerges from his bedroom with a wide smile and tells everyone that he is taking a vacation.

He packs his bags and spends two weeks on a beach in Jamaica with Natasha, sipping mojitos, eating jerk chicken, and working on a tan.

He returns to Manhattan feeling like a new man.

On day 363, the anniversary of the day Loki took him, he gets very, very drunk. He'd been doing better on that front, and honestly, no one begrudges him the release today. In fact, the other Avengers slowly trickle into his room to join him, and soon everyone's completely wasted and Clint is reveling in the feeling that he's not alone.

Early on day 365, the anniversary of the Chitauri invasion, Clint locks himself in his room. But Tony comes by a few hours later and unscrews the hinges on his door, setting it off to the side. "Sorry, Barton. Not today." Behind him, Natasha, Bruce, Steve, and Thor all nod at Clint gravely in agreement.

And Clint's annoyed at the intrusion for maybe ten seconds, but then he shrugs. "Yeah. You're right. Wanna go get shawarma?"

Well, no one particularly does (no one had liked it that much), but it seems like the start of a really good tradition.

So they all go anyway. Because it's not really about the food. It's about marking the passing of time.

It has been a year.

And Clint's survived.


	5. Shackled

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He was free from Loki's mind control, but he was not free.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for suicide, major character death.

He had been released from Loki's mind control, but he was not free.

He thought he remembered what freedom had been like, before all of this had happened, before an unwelcome presence had invaded his mind and hijacked his body. Before Loki had taken from him his ability to choose his actions, but had left him with their consequences.

And the guilt.

No, he was not free.

He could get close, though, standing on the roof of Stark Tower, looking out over Manhattan. So far removed from the rest of humanity, he could ignore his own humanity. He could feel the same empty nothingness that Loki had gifted him with, a vacant bliss in which there was no pain, no lingering fears, no guilt. He left that behind, set it neatly aside.

But it was not freedom. It was, at best, a brief reprieve from his life sentence, a few hours of sun in the prison yard before being locked once again into his cell. All of it waited for him in the eyes and thoughts of every person who looked at him and _knew_ what he was. What he had done.

His prison was one that he carried with him constantly, and it was an exhausting burden. The weight of it dragged him down, rendering him, at times, completely incapable of movement, almost incapable of thought. He would lie in bed for days, stupefied, watching the sun's movement across the sky via the shadows on the wall. Sometimes Natasha would come see him, but after the first few times, she no longer tried to get him up, to get him to move.

She was strong, but not strong enough to break him free.

This misery was, he supposed, self-inflicted. Perhaps the result of some previously-unknown masochistic streak. But he could not stop his self-flagellating, and he could not unlock the shackles binding him, despite holding the key in his hand. No matter how many times he heard that it was not his fault, that he had not been responsible for what had happened, it changed nothing. Because it was his fault. Loki had sensed in him some weakness, some vulnerability, and he had been attracted to it like flies were drawn to the thick stench of rotting garbage.

Some defect in him had drawn Loki in, and that, Clint thought, placed the burden of guilt solidly on his own shoulders.

And the guilt now held him hostage, so he was not free.

"You can't do this to yourself," Rogers had said one night, when he literally stumbled across Clint in the underground parking garage of the Tower. Clint had been slumped over in a corner, nearly passed out drunk, perilously close to a puddle of his own vomit. He had revealed, with some prompting, that he had not eaten for almost three days, had not slept in the same amount of time. Even in the deep shadows, Steve could see that Clint had lost weight in the weeks since the Chitauri invasion. He looked tired, and miserable, and defeated.

Clint had mumbled something unintelligible in response to Steve's declaration.

"What was that?"

With an attempt at a smirk, Clint had repeated, "Sure I can. Someone has to."

"Has to...?"

"Do this to me. Someone has to."

The shocked, almost horrified look on Steve's face indicated to Clint that that supersoldier, despite his enhanced abilities, lacked the capacity to free him.

Upon reflection, Clint thought that maybe the first day had been the worst. The first full day, when he woke up in his own bed to face his new life as an indiscriminate murderer. The first order of business that day, of course, had been seeing Loki off.

That bastard couldn't be gone soon enough, after all.

Thor had pulled him aside that morning, to express his sincere regrets about his brother's actions. And Clint had listened to his explanations, his apologies, his reassurances because it seemed like Thor wouldn't let him go until he did. Throughout, he had felt nothing but the hollow certainty that, though Thor might be able to exculpate Loki with enough time (because brotherly love could conquer all, even megalomaniacal psychopathy), the demigod could speak no words that would break the invisible bars behind which Clint was now imprisoned.

Clint would have sworn that, behind that muzzle, Loki was grinning at him. He knew what he had done, what he would continue to do long after he had left Earth altogether. And Clint did not think it was fair, that while Loki might someday be physically imprisoned, he would never know, would never experience, the horror of the cell he had constructed for Clint.

"Fuck him," Tony had said later that night, passing Clint a bottle of whiskey. They had forgone glasses hours ago. "He's gone, never coming back. So let it go, Barton."

It wasn't that easy, though, and Clint didn't think he could let it go, was not even sure he wanted to. Someone had to bear this burden, to carry this. A penance had to be paid. But that wasn't something he could explain to Tony Stark, who lived in a pragmatic world of "Does it work?" and had no time for trying to break a lock that, by all rights, should not have existed at all.

And so the shackles remained, and the prison door stayed firmly shut.

Surprisingly, it had been Dr. Banner who had been the most understanding of Clint's plight. Of all the Avengers, he alone saw the prison and shackles clearly. It had been a relief, really, knowing that someone understood. Even if he could do nothing to help.

They didn't see much of each other. Banner kept to the Tower, mostly, and stuck almost entirely to his bedroom and the lab that Tony had set up for him. Clint, on the other hand, was in and out, running between SHIELD's mandatory psychiatric assessments and meetings about how to rebuild Manhattan. So he'd been surprised when he'd found the physicist in the kitchen, gravely examining the back of a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

"This is disturbing," Banner had declared after another moment of contemplation. He set the box on the counter and reached for the fruit bowl instead. When he turned around, Clint could see the dark circles under his eyes.

"Trouble sleeping, Dr. Banner?" Clint had asked, more out of habit, ingrained politeness, than anything else.

With a wry smile, he had replied, "I'm having better luck than you, apparently."

Clint hadn't looked in a mirror in days. He couldn't meet his own gaze, too afraid of what he'd see in his eyes. Probably the same accusations he saw in everyone else’s. So he'd take Banner's word that he looked like shit.

When it became apparent that Clint was not going to reply, Bruce had said, "You're probably tired of hearing this, but it's not your fault. What happened."

Clint had just shrugged. "I know."

The physicist gave him a knowing look. "No, I don't think you do. But...someday you will. Guilt is heavy, Barton. You have to drop it before it breaks you.”

And he'd taken his apple and left.

In the subsequent months, Clint had learned that lesson, had learned it long, and hard. During those endless days of lying listlessly in bed, or while drinking himself stupid to get through the nights, he thought often of the 'someday' Banner had promised, when this guilt would evaporate and the door of his prison would burst open.

It never came.

So he sought a refuge, and found it here beneath the night sky, pacing the edge of the roof. This place offered him something akin to peace, and he lapped it up, sucked it in, trying to store it like oxygen in his blood cells so he could carry it with him always.

But it was only a reprieve, and he knew that. He couldn't take this pseudo-freedom with him. He would soon be re-shackled, the door of his prison locked firmly behind him.

The thought was...unbearable.

Because he remembered freedom, remembered what it had been like before all of this happened. But it was gone, never coming back. No one could break him out of this prison, he knew that. No one was strong enough to break the locks, to bend the bars, to force the doors that held him captive.

No one except...himself. Because he held the key, had held it all along. And he did not have to break a lock or bend a bar.

He just had to take a single step forward.

Loki had built this cage, but Clint could destroy it, after all.

The 'someday,' he realized, as the wind whipped past his free-falling form, was now.

And now he was finally free.


	6. You Owe Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint does Natasha a favor. Never again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Canon typical violence.

He felt, rather than heard, the metacarpals of his right hand crunch under the heel of a boot.

It was a nauseating feeling, and Clint retched, partly from the sensation and partly from the pain. He couldn't move, couldn't pull away, because there was another foot between his shoulder blades pinning him to the ground, and at the moment, he didn't think moving was a particularly good idea anyway.

The barrel of the rifle at the base of his skull warned against it, pressing against his neck firmly.

 _This_ , Clint decided,  _is the last time I ever do anything nice for another person_.

And then something hard cracked him on the back of the head, and he was out like a light.

* * *

 

"And why can't you do it again?" He was leaning casually against the door frame, looking into the bathroom.

Natasha lifted her head from the toilet she'd just finished vomiting into and glared, white-faced and shiny with sweat. "I have  _food poisoning_ , Barton. I'm not going anywhere 'til I'm not puking every five minutes." She took a deep breath and stood, hitting the flush handle and grabbing her bottle of mouthwash.

Clint watched her rinse her mouth out, torn between laughter and pity. He'd had his fair share of food poisoning—had once been quite the fan of oysters, but not anymore—and so he knew how much she was suffering. Still, he couldn't help but point out, "This is what you get for eating Stark's clam chowder. You know that man can't cook."

She spat the mouthwash into the sink and rinsed it out. Bitterly, she muttered, "I didn't know  _he_ made it, I thought he'd  _ordered_ it. Why would he cook?"

"Bruce," Clint answered simply. "He's trying to impress him." Honestly, Clint thought it was kind of cute, though he honestly couldn't figure out if Tony was trying to woo Bruce or just become his BFF. He hoped it was the latter—he liked Pepper, didn't want Tony to lose something that fantastic. Of course, maybe Pepper was okay with a threesome...

Natasha did not, apparently, think it was cute and interrupted his reverie with a terse, "How nice for them. Does  _Bruce_ have food poisoning?"

"Er, no. You're the only one who braved the chowder."

She pushed past him roughly, going to curl up on the bed in a miserable ball. "I love clam chowder. Loved. I  _loved_ clam chowder." She closed her eyes with a weary sigh.

"Nat. The mission?"

Groaning, she looked up at him. "Look, it's easy. In and out. Fury wants the information on this guy's hard drive. I was going to wine and dine him—" abruptly, she got up and ran for the bathroom, slamming the door behind her.

When she came back, Clint was laying on the half of her bed that she had left undisturbed, hands behind his head.

"Get your nasty boots off my bed," Natasha demanded, with about five hundred percent less vehemence than she could normally muster. In fact, Clint almost felt confident enough to ignore her.

Almost, but not quite. He kicked his boots off. "Sorry. The mission?"

She gingerly laid next to him. "Yeah. I was going to get the mark drunk, maybe give him a little something extra, and download the files while he was out." She turned her head to face him. "You might want to take a different approach, I don't think you're his type."

Clint was deeply wounded. "I'm everyone's type."

"Shut up. Will you do it?"

"Can't it wait 'til you're better?" Clint hated doing undercover work passionately, and this would probably entail at least  _some_ of that.

"No. Fury thinks there's going to be an attack in the next few days. He needs the intel so we can be prepared."

Clint sighed. He supposed this was the sort of thing he'd signed up for, agreeing to work for both SHIELD and the Avengers. Slave to two masters and all. "Ugh, fine. I'll do it."

She smiled, though it looked more like a pained grimace. "Great. Fury's expecting you at 8:00 tomorrow morning."

"...You already told him I'd do it?"

"Of course I did."

He didn't answer, and within a few moments, Natasha had fallen asleep.

Then, he extricated himself from the bed, grabbed his boots, and headed over to his own rooms to get ready to go.

He shot Natasha one last fond look before he left.  _The things I do for you...even when your breath smells like puke_.

* * *

 

His right hand had swollen to almost twice its normal size, and twitching his fingers even a small amount sent sharp tendrils of pain almost to his elbow. He couldn't do more than twitch his fingers. Which meant that using his bow was completely out of the question.

Not that he was really planning on it, at the moment. He had, after all, just regained consciousness and found himself duct taped to a chair.

Clint didn't think that was too bad, though. Duct tape was doable. It was better than the handcuffs you had to dislocate your thumb to get out of. One of his hands was already fucked up, he didn't really fancy screwing with the other one, too. He could still use a gun left-handed.

The room he was in was brightly lit, white, and nowhere that he recognized. There was a camera in one corner, and one wall was taken up with a mirror that was almost certainly one-way glass.

He was, apparently, being watched.

Behind him, a door opened.

"You," a voice said, "Are not the Black Widow."

The mission briefing had been surprisingly...brief. He was supposed to find the mark in São Paulo, get the files, and get out. The 'why' was pretty much nonexistent, which didn't bother Clint much—if he needed to know, they'd tell him—but its absence was conspicuous.

He thought of calling Nat for more info, but decided to let her rest. God knew she needed it.

"You're right, I'm not the Black Widow," Clint said. "Nice deduction."

The man—a complete stranger, not anyone connected to the mission—backhanded him, snapping Clint's head to the side. He wished, then, that he could shut up and  _not_ say every snarky thing that crossed his mind.

"Where is she?"

Clint ran his tongue along his teeth, tasting blood. God damn it. "She's home sick with the stomach flu. But luckily, she sent me, the far more good-looking member of our little—"

He was cut off abruptly with another slap.

This time, blood flooded his mouth when his teeth cut the inside of his cheek.

Clint pulled on his duct-taped hands, a dribble of blood running down his chin.

_Fuck this shit._

* * *

 

Clint knew this mission was going to be fubar when his plane got shot down in the literal middle of a South American jungle.

He was still a few hours out from his landing site, there should have been no one around. Let alone anyone capable of shooting down an aircraft. Let alone a SHIELD aircraft.

He'd been so surprised from the impact and the subsequent alarms blaring in the cabin that it had taken him a moment to register what had happened. But then he was on autopilot, working to eject himself from the rapidly-descending jet. He grabbed his bag of gear before hitting the button to open the hatch and jumping out.

Parachuting was one of his least favorite activities, and parachuting into what was apparently hostile territory ranked even further down the list. Still, between that and dying in a fiery plane crash, he'd take the parachute.

He'd gotten tangled in a tree, of course, because this was the fucking jungle. And then when he'd cut himself down, using the knife in a sheath on his ankle, he'd landed on his stuff, which dug deeply and painfully into his back.

Clint had sworn before he'd had the good goddamn sense to shut his trap, and then he'd heard people approaching, whacking through the undergrowth with what sounded like machetes.

So Clint had practically leapt off the ground, ignoring the bruise forming on his back, and darted away, shimmying up another tree 'til he was out of sight.

The voices had gotten closer, and Clint had been surprised to hear they were speaking English. "There's her chute. She can't be far." He watched as they spread out, his keen eyesight proving very convenient.

_She?_

Evidently, these people had been expecting him. Well. Expecting Nat. That didn't bode well.

He'd ended up staying in that tree for the better part of six hours, hoping a jaguar or something didn't come along and eat him. Only then had he felt secure enough to pull out his phone, turn it on, and call this disaster in.

"Barton, report," Fury had barked. Clint wondered if he was imagining the concern in his voice. "We got a report that your jet went down."

"Uh, yup. It did." In the dark, at the top of his tree, he'd been able to see the faint orange glow where the wreck was smouldering a few miles away.

"Care to explain that, agent?"

"I got shot down, sir," Clint had said frankly. "And no, I don't know by who."

"Hmph," Fury had muttered. "Let me trace your location."

Clint waited. He'd known Fury couldn't have done it before—he'd had his phone off. He'd probably tracked the jet already, though.

After a moment, Fury'd barked, "We can extract you in the morning, if you can make it to one of our extraction points."

Which had sounded wonderful to Clint, but he'd felt obliged to point out, "They were expecting me, sir."

Fury had sighed and muttered, "That's...unexpected."

He had not offered anything else.

And so Clint had snapped, "Sir, I am sitting in a tree in the north of Brazil. It is dark, I am hungry, and I really need to pee. Is there a  _reason_ for any of this, and if so, could you maybe get to the point?"

"Just get to the extraction point, Barton. I'll send you the coordinates."

Clint had frowned mightily at that. "What about the data, sir? The  _mission?_ "

"It's not important, agent. Just get out of there."

Clint just loved working for SHIELD. Yes, indeed, he did.

* * *

 

One eye was swollen shut, he had crusted blood on his face, and he was getting really tired of this.

"Where is the Black Widow?"

"Alaskan cruise." He was getting less creative as time passed. His favorite answer thus far had been 'up your ass,' and that had earned him his black eye. He was kind of proud.

The man punched Clint in the stomach, and Clint groaned. That  _hurt_. He really needed to start thinking of a way to get out of this, but he was kind of distracted at the moment. Maybe once this douchebag left, he'd have some time to think.

"Where is the Black Widow?"

"Seriously," Clint wheezed. "She's not here. I told you—"

Another punch to the stomach. "I know she's here. Tell me."

This was getting old.

* * *

 

Clint had a flashlight, but he didn't want to use it. He suspected they were still looking for him, and he didn't want to send up a neon sign, 'Guy who is not Black Widow but is still your enemy over here.'

His caution was a waste of time anyway.

The extraction point was four miles from his tree, a small village with enough road to land a plane. He'd set out slowly, using his knife to get through the worst of the undergrowth and praying to everything he believed in that he wouldn't meet anything that was too keen on eating him.

He made it about halfway to the village before he heard a twig snap nearby.

 _You have got to be fucking kidding me_ ,he'd thought to himself. He was so  _close._

He had his bow slung across his back, and slowly he reached up and grabbed it along with an arrow. But the only light was coming from the moon above, and he couldn't see anything through the deep shadows.

 _That's 'cause I'm 'Hawkeye' and not 'Owleye' or fucking something,_ he'd thought with absolutely  _no_ bitterness at all.

And then someone had fired a gun.

Instinct had taken over and Clint had dropped down, hearing the bullet whiz by him. He'd rolled, firing an arrow in the general direction he thought the shot had come from. Then he'd heard footsteps approaching at a run, and before he could move, a boot had connected with the side of his head, and he was down.

He'd twisted and somersaulted away, dizzy, and had crashed into a tree before leaping to his feet. Despite his double vision, he'd been able to see that he'd been surrounded by about ten guys, all decked out in night vision gear. Wishing he had his own night vision gear on him, he raised his bow and loosed an arrow, aiming for the nearest person.

He'd heard a wet 'thock,' and a groan, but then the others had moved in. He'd fought, but even with all his training he wasn't a match for nine armed people.

So he'd found himself on his stomach, pinned to the ground, gun at his head.

With some asshole stomping his hand.

* * *

 

When the door burst open, Clint's first reaction was annoyance. Dealing with one random asshole pummeling him was bad enough, he didn't want to add more.

Then he saw who it was, and he was more annoyed.

"Lookin' good, Legolas," Tony Stark called, sauntering into the room. As much as one  _could_ saunter while wearing a metal suit of armor.

The man who'd been in the process of blackening Clint's other eye turned around when the door had opened, surprised. Tony lazily aimed one repulsor at him and blasted him across the room. He did not try to get up.

"All clear!" Tony called over his shoulder, flipping his face plate up. Steve popped his head in, hair mussed, tear in his suit, but otherwise looking way too Captain America-y for Clint's tastes. Apparently, whatever fight they had fought in order to get into this place hadn't done much to daunt Steve.

But he was holding a knife, at least, which he used to free Clint from his sticky restraints.

"Thanks," Clint muttered, wiping a hand across his face to get the blood off. He succeeded only in smearing it.

"Uh, no problem," Steve answered. "Bet you're ready to go, huh?"

"You have no idea," Clint said. He stood and stretched, relieved to be standing despite the pain it caused.

And when Tony looked like he was going to make a smart comment, Clint's blood-caked frown was enough to silence him.

* * *

 

"You owe me."

"I know."

"Did you even have food poisoning?"

"As a matter of fact, yes. Still do. It was convenient, though. I would have found  _some_ excuse to foist my mission off on you, but that worked just as well."

"Right. Couldn't just tell me what was up?"

"Fury's orders. It had to look genuine. And you hate going undercover, so really, it was to help you."

"Yeah, really fucking helpful." He poked gingerly at the bruising around his eyes, at his broken nose. "But you know I'm always glad to be of service."

He  _had_ been that, even if the whole 'mission' had been a farce.

Fury had explained it to Clint while medical had been patching him up. Apparently, Fury had suspected they had a leak somewhere in the SHIELD hierarchy. To isolate it, he'd arranged this convoluted mission, telling some people that Natasha would be doing the mission, telling others that it had been changed last minute. He wanted to see where the information went, and what version was spread.

The 'data' Clint had been 'stealing' had just been a diversion, really, to hide the fact that Fury was trying to flush out the leak.

The only problem with his plan was that Natasha had a bit of a reputation in São Paulo, and there had been some people in the area who'd been very eager to get ahold of her when they'd heard through the grapevine that she was going to be there.

Fury, in all his genius, hadn't accounted for that. Small oversight, really. Natasha hadn't known that Fury was sending Clint there, or else she would have stepped in and said something. At least, that's what she'd said. And Clint didn't doubt her, he just wished Fury had been a little more forthcoming all around. Paranoid asshole.

So when Clint ran into trouble, as it was his habit to, Fury had sent Stark and Rogers in on an impromptu rescue mission. Which they'd executed surprisingly well, considering the two of them worked together terribly.

Really, though, the plan was very clever and super-spyish, but Clint wasn't in an appreciative mood. Considering he could have died in the plane crash. Or been eaten by a jaguar. Or tortured to death.

"That asshole knocked one of my teeth out."

"Sorry." Natasha actually sounded sorry, too, and that went a long way to soothe Clint's raised hackles. He felt his lingering irritation start to fade.

The pair of them were lying on Natasha's bed, like they had been before Clint had gone on his 'mission.' Clint's hand was in a cast, and he kept that arm curled up on top of him. The rest of his injuries, though painful, were mostly superficial, although his nose was going to take a while to heal.

"You look awful," Natasha muttered, turning her head to face him. There was a faint sheen of sweat on her forehead and she had dark circles under her eyes that Clint suspected may not have been entirely related to her food poisoning. She hadn't slept.

"Hello, kettle," Clint answered, small smile on his lips. Then, "Your breath smells like puke."

As it turned out, she wasn't too weakened from her illness to punch him.

But she was considerate enough to do it somewhere he wasn't already bruised.


End file.
